I recently had the pleasure of a client at work that wanted pagination for his online newspaper-thing, and so I had the opportunity to think a bit about pagination on the web in general, and why it, in many cases, is a bad idea.

First, let me make a distiction:

Logical pagination

Now, this is the good pagination. The kind of pagination (Ajax or not) that saves my browser from having to load all the 538 comments on an interesting piece of news on Digg.